With continuous improvement of network information technologies, sizes of networks of network operators are constantly expanding, and requirements of users on network quality are increasingly higher. In order to monitor network operating performance and to promptly identify problems when faults occur on a network, the network operators have developed a network quality monitoring technology.
When network quality monitoring is performed, if a network fault occurs on a direct link, it is difficult for a network management system to locate the direct link, between two communications devices, on which the network fault occurs; in this case, first, a Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) technology is generally used to discover direct links between communications devices on a network and a topological relationship among all the communications devices; then, a measurement control point (MCP) is manually deployed on one communications device of each pair of two neighboring communications devices on the network, and a data collecting point (DCP) is manually deployed on the other device; and the MCP collects statistics on monitoring data of a direct link between the two communications devices, and reports the monitoring data to the network management system.
Although a current commonly-used link quality monitoring technology can enable a network management system to monitor operating performance of an entire network, when a size of a network is relatively large, a topological relationship among devices is relatively complex, and manually deploying MCPs and DCPs not only requires heavy workload and consumes a relatively large quantity of man power but also easily causes errors and omissions. In addition, in a current MCP deployment manner, there are a relatively large quantity of MCPs on a network, which may reduce efficiency of communication between an MCP and a network management device. Therefore, a technology that can automatically and efficiently completes direct-link quality monitoring on a network is needed.